Philip Roth: Everyman

The malaise began just days after his return home from a month long vacation as happy as any he'd known since the family vacations at the Jersey Shore before the war. He'd spent August in a semi-furnished ramshackle house on an inland road on Martha's Vineyard with the woman whose constant lover he had been for two years. Until now they'd never dared to chance living together day in and day out, and the experiment had been a joyous success, a wonderful month of swimming and hiking and of easygoing sex at all times of the day. They'd swim across a bay to a ridge of dunes where they could lie out of sight and fuck in the sunshine and then rouse themselves to slip into their suits and swim back to the beach and collect clusters of mussels off the rocks to carry home for dinner in a pail full of seawater.

The only unsettling moments were at night, when they walked along the beach together. The dark sea rolling in with its momentous thud and the sky lavish with stars made Phoebe rapturous but frightened him. The profusion of stars told him unambiguously that he was doomed to die, and the thunder of the sea only yards away – and the nightmare of the blackest blackness beneath the frenzy of the water – made him want to run from the menace of oblivion to their cozy, lighted, underfurnished house. This was not the way he had experienced the vastness of the sea and the big night sky while he'd served manfully in the navy just after the Korean War – never were they the tolling bells. He could not understand where the fear was coming from and had to use all his strength to conceal it from Phoebe. Why must he mistrust his life just when he was more its master than he'd been in years? Why should he imagine himself on the edge of extinction when calm, straightforward thinking told him that there was so much more solid life to come? Yet it happened every night during their seaside walk beneath the stars. He was not flamboyant or deformed or extreme in any way, so why then, at his age, should he be haunted by thoughts of dying? He was reasonable and kindly, an amicable, moderate, industrious man, as everyone who knew him well would probably agree, except, of course, for the wife and two boys whose household he'd left and who, understandably, could not equate reasonableness and kindliness with his finally giving up on a failed marriage and looking elsewhere for the intimacy with a woman that he craved.

Most people, he believed, would have thought of him as square. As a young man, he'd thought of himself as square, so conventional and unadventurous that after art school, instead of striking out on his own to paint and to live on whatever money he could pick up at odd jobs – which was his secret ambition – he was too much the good boy, and, answering to his parents' wishes rather than his own, he married, had children, and went into advertising to make a secure living. He never thought of himself as anything more than an average human being, and one who would have given anything for his marriage to have lasted a lifetime. He had married with just that expectation. But instead marriage became his prison cell, and so, after much tortuous thinking that preoccupied him while he worked and when he should have been sleeping, he began fitfully, agonizingly, to tunnel his way out. Isn't that what an average human being would do? Isn't that what average human beings do every day? Contrary to what his wife told everyone, he hadn't hungered after the wanton freedom to do anything and everything. Far from it. He hungered for something stable all the while he detested what he had. He was not a man who wished to live two lives. He held no grudge against either the limitations or the comforts of conformity. He'd wanted merely to empty his mind of all the ugly thoughts spawned by the disgrace of prolonged marital warfare. He was not claiming to be exceptional. Only vulnerable and assailable and confused. And convinced of his right, as an average human being, to be pardoned ultimately for whatever deprivations he may have inflicted upon his innocent children in order not to live deranged half the time.

Terrifying encounters with the end? I'm thirty-four! Worry about oblivion, he told himself, when you're seventy-five! The remote future will be time enough to anguish over the ultimate catastrophe!

But no sooner did he and Phoebe return to Manhattan – where they lived in apartments some thirty blocks apart – than he mysteriously fell ill. He lost his appetite and his energy and found himself nauseated throughout the day, and he could not walk a city block without feeling weak and woozy.

The doctor could find nothing wrong with him. He had begun to see a psychoanalyst in the aftermath of his divorce, and the psychoanalyst attributed his condition to envy of a fellow art director who had just been promoted to a vice presidency in the agency.

"It makes you sick," the analyst said.

He maintained that his colleague was twelve years his senior and a generous coworker whom he only wished well, but the analyst continued to harp on "deep-seated envy" as the hidden reason for the malaise, and when circumstances proved him wrong, the analyst appeared unperturbed by his mistaken judgment.

He went to the medical doctor's office several more times in the succeeding weeks, whereas ordinarily he saw him only for a minor problem every couple of years. But he'd lost weight and the bouts of nausea were getting worse. He'd never before felt so rotten, not even after he'd left Cecilia and the two small boys and the court battle ensued over the terms of the separation and he was characterized to the court by Cecilia's attorney as "a well-known philanderer" because of the affair he was having with Phoebe, who was a new copywriter in the agency (and who was referred to in court by the plaintiff on the witness stand – aggrieved, overwrought, as though she found herself bringing charges against the Marquis de Sade – as "number thirty-seven in his parade of girlfriends," when in fact she was looking too far into the future and Phoebe was as yet number two). At least back then there'd been a recognizable cause for all the misery he felt. But this was his turning overnight from someone who was bursting with health into someone inexplicably losing his health.

A month passed. He couldn't concentrate on his work, he gave up his morning swim, and by now he couldn't look at food. On a Friday afternoon he left work early and took a taxi to the doctor's office without having made an appointment or even a phone call. The only one he phoned was Phoebe, to tell her what he was doing.

"Admit me to a hospital," he told the doctor. "I feel like I'm dying."

The doctor made the arrangements, and Phoebe was at the hospital's information desk when he arrived. By five o'clock he was settled into a room, and just before seven a tall, tanned, good-looking middle-aged man wearing a dinner jacket came into the room and introduced himself as a surgeon who had been called by his physician to take a look at him. He was on his way to some formal event but wanted to stop by first to do a quick examination. What he did was to press his hand down very hard just above the groin on the right side. Unlike the regular physician, the surgeon kept pressing and the pain was excruciating. He felt on the verge of vomiting. The surgeon said, "Haven't you had any stomach pain before?" "No," he said. "Well, it's your appendix. You need an operation." "When?" "Now."

He saw the surgeon next in the operating room. He'd changed out of the evening clothes into a surgical gown. "You've saved me from a very boring banquet," the surgeon said.

He didn't wake up until the next morning. Standing at the foot of the bed, along with Phoebe, were his mother and father, looking grim. Phoebe, whom they did not know (other than from Cecilia's denigrating descriptions, other than from the telephone tirades ending, "I pity this Little Miss Muffet coming after me – I honestly do pity the vile little Quaker slut!"), had phoned them and they'd immediately driven over from New Jersey. As best he could make out, a male nurse seemed to be having trouble feeding some sort of tube up his nose, or maybe the nurse was trying to extract it. He spoke his first words – "Don't fuck up!" – before falling back into unconsciousness.